Breaking from Tradition: Market Research, Consumer Needs, and Design Futures

Market research has played a central role in new product development (NPD).Its role in NPD is concerned with exploring, testing, and validating the design and development of new products and the improvement of existing products.It can be particularly helpful in the early stages of a development activity because it focuses the activities of the development team.Time spent early on researching the market and developing a product specification is essential in preventing costly and time-consuming modifications.S U P P O R T I n evaluating innovative goods and services, people are notoriously inaccurate when it comes to articulating future desires and priorities.Rachel Cooper and Martyn Evans outline broad research strategies that address this problem: ethnographic studies, scenarios modeling, and distilling trends in emergent behavior.All have the potential of providing designers with valuable glimpses of markets yet to come.